I felt the same way about tech meetups about 18 months ago - myself and my immediate circle of friends just stopped attending them: Watching someone go through

I felt the same way about tech meetups about 18 months ago - myself and my immediate circle of friends just stopped attending them: Watching someone go through the absolute basics of Amazon Web Services or node.js in a real life presentation simply does not provide any value to me, and then to spread it out over a clumsy 35 minute presentation moves it into a "painful" category. The good parts were in the discussions and questions afterwards but they were often severely truncated because, well, we gotta fit in another half-hour presentation on... unit testing. The "Oh, come talk to me afterwards" rejoinder that genuinely interesting questions got seemed like a cruel tease. Anyway, recently I took this slightly negative attitude and turned it on its head - what if I ran a tech event with the talk-to-question ratio completely inverted? If the discussions were what we liked, why not create an environment were the talk was simply a quick 5 minute introduction framing an extended, round-table discussion period? It's still early days, but this has worked extremely well so far. (The result, if anyone's intested, is at: http://www.manytomany.co.uk/ http://www.manytomany.co.uk/)